A painting by Hafsa Imran

Memento MoriWhat Remains

Flowers kept after they have faded, and a question about the one thing that does not.

Memento Mori (What Remains) is a mixed-media work by Lahore artist Hafsa Imran. Dried roses, baby's breath and wildflowers, bound with a gold satin ribbon, lie across a black canvas, their stems hanging free below and drips running down from the top edge.

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Last updated: 22 October 2026

Memento Mori (What Remains), a mixed-media work by Hafsa Imran on a wooden easel: dried roses, baby's breath and wildflowers in faded crimson, plum, blush, cream and gold, bound across a black canvas with a gold satin ribbon, their stems hanging below and drips of pink and white running down from the top edge — Hafsa Imran, *Memento Mori (What Remains)*. Hand-painted by Hafsa Imran.

Look closely

What is in the painting

Across a black canvas runs a long band of dried flowers: roses in faded crimson, plum, blush and cream, small clouds of baby's breath, and wildflowers gone to gold and brown.

A gold satin ribbon binds them together near the middle, tied in a bow, and below it their stems hang loose, at different lengths, into the dark.

Along the top edge, drips of pink and white run down the black, like wax from a candle or rain on a window.

Artist: Hafsa Imran (Lahore, Pakistan)
Title: Memento Mori (What Remains)
Form: Mixed media: dried flowers and ribbon on canvas, landscape format
Images: Digital presentation of the work, prepared with AI tools from a photograph of the canvas.

Detail of Hafsa Imran's Memento Mori: the gold satin ribbon tied in a bow around the stems of the dried flowers — Detail. The gold ribbon, tied the way a gift is tied.

Detail of Hafsa Imran's Memento Mori: dried roses in plum, crimson, blush and cream with baby's breath — Detail. Roses past their best: plum, crimson, blush and cream.

Detail of Hafsa Imran's Memento Mori: drips of pink and white running down the black canvas above the dried flowers — Detail. Drips running down from the top edge, like wax from a candle.

The story

Reading Memento Mori

Remember that you will die

Memento mori is Latin for "remember that you will die". Painters have kept the idea alive for centuries. The Dutch vanitas still lifes of the 1600s set skulls, guttering candles and flowers just past their best beside fruit and silver, to remind the viewer that beauty does not last.

A flower studio's other half

Hafsa's studio, Bloom & Beyond, makes bouquets for other people's happiest days. This work shows the part of a flower's life that a bouquet never does. These roses are past their bloom, and she has kept them anyway, bound with a ribbon the way a gift is bound.

A dried rose is not gone. It keeps its shape and much of its colour long after a fresh one would have fallen apart. The work holds that in-between: past its bloom, not yet nothing.

What remains

Surah Ar-Rahman says it in two short lines: everyone on earth will perish, and the Face of your Lord remains, full of majesty and honour (55:26–27).

The flowers will fade further, and the ribbon, and in time the canvas too. The title asks the question the verse answers.

The description and reading on this page are written by the Bloom & Beyond studio. They are our reading of the painting, not a statement by the artist.

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